I squirmed and looked toward the door leading to the server room. “My team?—”
“I made sure food was brought up as per their preferences, about forty minutes ago. They were also the ones who wanted me to check on you because they knew you wouldn’t listen to them if they tried to get you to take a minute and actually eat.”
“And they think you can do it?”
“Yes, now come sit down and eat your damned dinner in a chair,” he told me bluntly, turning to head toward the stairs to his office.
“Damn, aren’t we feeling bossy today?” I asked in surprise and mild annoyance. “Not sure how I feel about that.”
“I remember Malcolm telling me that when you were in the right mood, you were quite fond of a bossy man,” he said lightly as he started climbing the stairs.
To that I managed an incredibly witty and quick response of…sputtering in shock. “I beg the finest of your fucking pardons? What the hell were you two talking about forthatto come up? I’ll dig him up and smack him!”
“Which would be impressive considering he wasn’t buried; have fun trying to find enough of his ashes after years to slap around,” he said as he opened the office door and headed in.
The dark humor took me off guard, but I still couldn’t hold back my snort. “Yeah, alright. I guess that’s a good point, but I still say you’re being bossy.”
“And I say you’ll survive it,” he said as he sat behind his desk, pointing toward the chair on the other side. “Now sit and eat your food already.”
It wasn’t often that Marc told me what to do, so I took the chastisement with a modicum of grace and plopped down into the chair, setting my container on the desk in front of me. Now, I hadn’t come with anything more than a napkin and some silverware, so I seriously hoped he didn’t mind if I made a mess. I was more than fine with making a mess at my desk, but if he was going to invite an infamously messy eater along for lunch, then he needed to be prepared for the consequences.
I eyed the food he had collected for himself, or more likely had delivered by a member of the staff, and sighed. “Had your big meal for the day, I take it?”
He glanced down at his salad. “Hm?”
“You normally have one big meal a day; the rest are lighter meals that aren’t overly filling,” I said, jabbing my sauce-coveredfork at the salad and watching as some of it splattered onto the desk.
“I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that you’ve learned my eating habits,” he said with a grimace, taking a tissue from the nearby box and wiping up the sauce, leaving the tissue on the desk, probably in anticipation of more mess. “I’m more surprised it took you this long to comment.”
“Just because I know something doesn’t mean I’malwaysgoing to say something,” I told him. “Just like I know for a fact that you usually save your biggest meal for lunchtime. I wasn’t sure about that one for a while since most people, even me, prefer to keep their bigger meal for the late one since a heavy meal in the middle of the day is a guaranteed path to being groggy for a couple of hours.”
“Until you realized that I already get groggy in the afternoon, so I double down and take a nap after lunch,” he finished for me with a small smile.
“Exactly,” I said with a snort. “I’d call it self-awareness, but you probably spent an unreasonable amount of time coming to that conclusion and settling on a plan.”
“You say as if you don’t have your entire day planned out.”
My phone buzzed, and I frowned at the reminder that I was supposed to be talking to my team about updates to the system that would iron some bugs out. “Well, it’s either that or I end up running around like a chicken with my head cut off, like I did before I came to work at Arete.”
Organization and timekeeping were hard, and no one could tell me otherwise. Anyone to whom it came easily was a freak of nature and needed to be studied by the government as soon as possible. Well, except for Marc, there wasn’t much to study in that regard. Most of his life had been spent honing those exact skills, so there was no mystery where they had come from.
“It still amuses me when people learn that my partner, who maintains the guest and Guide side of things, who was coincidentally the first Guide this place ever had, came from a software engineer background,” Marc said with a chuckle as he carefully stabbed a piece of lettuce and the saddest shred of chicken I’d ever seen. “Mostly because I think their idea of what a software engineer should look and act like is quite…different from you.”
“They expect me to be socially awkward and weird, which I am. I just pull both off in a way some people find endearing,” I said with a shrug. My phone buzzed again, and it was Angie’s message on the screen.
We’re already bug-fixing the update; don’t come crawling down here and getting underfoot. Eat.
I scowled, but I knew better than to argue. My team had been handpicked by me because of their skill and dedication, and personality. If my team was confident in what they were doing, and what I wanted, enough to give me shit and start without me…well, that was good.
And if not? Well, they would have to enjoy the consequence of working longer hours with me to fix whatever they screwed up.
Marc gave a heavy sigh and leaned back, staring at his screen, cupping the back of his head with two hands as he looked thoughtful. His suit jacket was still on but unbuttoned, and I could see the way his shirt stretched over his chest. The space between two of the buttons was stretched enough that I could see the smallest patch of skin. It was barely worth paying attention to, and yet I felt my face warm as I ducked my head to stare at my phone instead.
A few days was long enough for me to at least pretend to be normal around Marc, but it wasn’t enough for me tofeelnormal. To his credit, Marc had kept his unspoken promise not to bringup the other morning again, and I was grateful. That didn’t mean I was feeling any better about what had happened…what he’d seen.
I knew he was right; there was nothing shameful about something I’d been doing since I was a teenager. It had been far too long since I had any relief; sometimes I forgot to take care of even that basic ‘need’ when I was busy. And I really had forgotten he was there with me, if it was even possible to remember something that probably hadn’t made it out of my short-term memory because of the alcohol in my system.
That didn’t change the fact that he’d seen me jerking off. I didn’t want to think of how long he watched me before he’d reacted to what had undoubtedly been shock at what he witnessed. I was just glad he was the understanding type.
